Believe it or not we are all constantly lying to ourselves. We all pretend to ourselves that we did not see a certain thing or that we did not experience this or that. It is amazing how powerful our minds are at being able to completely ignore certain data in order to make us feel better.

The first big reason why we lie to ourselves is that we are trying to avoid pain. Quite often when we do not want to experience a negative feeling, we will often overlook internal thoughts and external sense data. This is actually a great coping mechanism that allows people in very stressful and traumatic situations to pool their resources by focusing completely on just trying to survive. This is similar to the mammalian diving response where the body reduces the amount of blood to the extremities and focuses most of the blood in the heart and the brain. This is also done by the awareness; when something becomes too traumatic and too hard to deal with, consciousness removes its awareness from them in order to focus itself completely on trying to survive the situation. Just like the mammalian diving response, this conscious response is there for good reasons and is very useful under certain extreme conditions.

Unfortunately this conscious response is not always the best response in all situations. In order to overcome and to become stronger, you must be strong enough to face any situation. We lie to ourselves when we believe that we are not conscious of certain things. This relates directly to the second reason why we usually lie to ourselves; the belief that most of our awareness is based in the subconscious and that we have little power over our perceptions and actions. This is not the case since our entire perception is conscious and we have access to any information that we want. The problem is that we have not taken the time to train ourselves to be fully aware of our conscious thoughts and feelings.

The best way to begin to stop lying to yourself is to become more and more aware of your conscious awareness. You do this by strengthening your attention and focusing this attention on your conscious mind. It is possible to perform any daily task and still pay attention to the thoughts and feelings that you are having at the time. Since most people do not make this a priority, they take it for granted that this is not possible and that there is no benefit in doing this. It is very possible to develop the type of attention required, and it is also a very beneficial. The great benefit is obviously the fact that you stop lying to yourself, by realizing that you are far more aware than you think.

With this increase in awareness, you can start to take responsibility for whatever action you take. In this way you also overcome a very powerful lie, this lie has you believing that you have no control over the circumstances that you face. By being more aware of your internal conscious world, you realize that your internal perceptions allow you to know ahead of time what a certain course of actions will create. So if you believe that bad stuff happens to you all the time for no reason, please then realized that through the conscious awareness that I speak of, you can become very aware of why these bad situations are happening and therefore discover ways to stop them.

To stop lying to yourself means that you see life as a challenge and not as something that is done on to you. Perhaps the hardest thing that we can do in our lives is to be honest with ourselves. To be honest with yourself might seem like the hard road but it is the only road that leads to self growth and greater personal awareness. This greater awareness is the key to a more fulfilling life and in my opinion it is the only road worth taking. Stop lying to yourself and grow in all ways.